


Setting The Board

by SamIAm



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Canon Relationships, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, POV Booker | Sebastien le Livre, POV Multiple, POV Nile Freeman, POV Quynh | Noriko, Post-Canon, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-17
Updated: 2020-09-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 07:14:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,930
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25959613
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SamIAm/pseuds/SamIAm
Summary: White moves first in chess, and black responds.Character studies of the pieces as a sequel begins.-Six months later, Booker blurrily returns to the apartment after finally getting thrown out of the bar at, oh, 600. He glances at the fragment of drafting tape he always leaves from jamb to bottom corner of the door. It hangs loose from the frame.He’s deadened his fine motor control pretty well this morning. Now his poison of choice slips from numb fingers. Cognac and glass go everywhere, and he manages the coordination to kick at the shards before collapsing on the stair to wait for death and capture.He waits a while.
Comments: 21
Kudos: 84





	1. Queen's knight, White-Booker

**Author's Note:**

> Nothing's AU until it gets Jossed, by which I mean this magic system is compliant with canon in a "possible but not probable" kind of way.
> 
> Disclaimer: This is rated mature for the same reason the movie was rated R-depiction of violence (and maybe there will be language tee em later). Anyone looking for onscreen sex will be disappointed.
> 
> See individual chapter end notes for more warnings.

Six months later, Booker blurrily returns to the apartment after finally getting thrown out of the bar at, oh, 600. He glances at the fragment of drafting tape he always leaves from jamb to bottom corner of the door. It hangs loose from the frame.

He’s deadened his fine motor control pretty well this morning. Now his poison of choice slips from numb fingers. Cognac and glass go everywhere, and he manages the coordination to kick at the shards before collapsing on the stair to wait for death and capture.

He waits a while.

…

See, the thing is, he’s stopped dreaming of Quynh.

He’d been seeing her, dying with her for over two hundred years. Nightly or daily in his sleep yes, but also every time he died. He’s familiar with the light at the end of the tunnel: It’s blue, and it bubbles with her waterlogged screams.

Booker breathes in air instead of ocean on resurrection, and that difference always knocks her from his eyes. The world rushes back in. But he’d always known he’d see her again when he slipped off, to momentary deaths or just to dreamland.

And then, three months after the only date that matters, it stopped.

…

See the thing is, he’d had over two hundred years to ponder this.

Not the whys, for that way madness lies. Not even the hows, for his life itself seems lunatic, and he has lost any hope that medicine will explain its mechanisms. No, just the whats and whens. When will it happen and what can he rely on?

He thinks he’s got the gist of it: they dream of each other when one of them dies.

Nothing impressive, nothing world-shattering. The wretched magics all stem from the immortality with them. One of them dies, and that sends out the visions.

Sometimes when Nicky’s gotten into his head he even has a reason. Not destiny, not being meant to find each other, no, nothing nice. But clearly something wants them alive and unmarked. Misery maybe, and its love for their company. The cruel universe at large. Whatever it is, if one of them dies, that’s a problem in that thing’s book.

So it alerts the others, the ones who aren’t already aware of the fallen, the ones who aren’t already at the departed’s aid. Prods them to protect a once and future peer.

…

See the thing is, he’d lied.

Lain. Lain still.

Because about fifty years into the bleak and lonely agelessness of his new existence, a woman from his dreams found him. She stepped out of his head and into the flesh, and almost immediately thereafter she stepped into his heart.

He wasn’t the only one anymore.

She wasn’t the only one, either. They’d separated for the search for him, and in those days messages took so long to travel, but relative to the vast stretch of isolation it was no time at all. Weeks maybe, months at most, and then there were two more in his unrelenting heart.

He never again saw them when he drank himself to death. He would only see them after, when he was back, because they would help him back up.

Instead, he saw her, over and over again, vivid detail and excruciating continuity where before there had been only flashes. He saw her in every single one of his deaths, in every single one of his dreams.

It started the very first time he slept in the room with them all, exhausted from the euphoria of finally meeting the men. He had jolted awake, which had then awoken the others.

He told him his dream, and they told him what it meant.

None of them slept again that night, but there was the night after to reckon with. And the next time as well, and many more after that. He could not cease from dreaming Quynh, could not ease from dying with her, and he woke the rest with his rousing.

It cut them all in a way that would not heal: Nicholas, Joseph, and most of all Andrea, that their beloved begrieved still suffered. Him, to see their sunken faces.

So he stopped. With time he learned to lie still through the suffocation and sorrow. When they realized his night terrors no longer disturbed them, Andrea asked if it could be because Quynh was finally at peace.

God stop saving him, he said yes. Let it lie.

…

See the thing is, he can’t tell them.

Forget betrayal and imprisonment and torture, forget one hundred years of solitude, forget Joe’s hurt anger and Nicky’s hurt silence and Nile’s hurt forgiveness.

Ay there's the rub: He is the boy who cried safety, was the wool disguising the wolf. He lied to Andy for fifteen decades, and she doesn’t want to see him again.

He cannot tell her that the dreams are over, that Quynh is truly gone, that Andy has gotten her wish for them both.

He can only wait for it to be one hundred years to the day from the only date that matters.

…

See the thing is, waiting is easier when he’s drunk.

It’s much easier when he’s drinking himself to death once more.

He’d only stopped when they’d begun making the shipwrecked faces he remembered from those early days of waking them. He couldn’t stand to hurt them, and so he had stopped.

Now he couldn’t hurt them worse than he already has.

And see the thing is, he sees Quynh again when he dies. Not drowned, not dark, not dying and dead. He sees her in flashes, alive and on land.

He revives gasping and wearing his first smile in months. He doesn’t know where, has no way to track her in those parts and situations unknown. But she is no longer trapped, no longer alone.

Or maybe the loneliness has gotten to him.

Either way, soon enough he's dying just to see her.

…

He staggers up, pushes the key into the lock only to discover it pushes open the door.

Suddenly his gun is in his hands, unwanted lifetimes of readiness beating out half a year's dismal acceptance.

He must have waited on that step a long time for his finger to be so solid and steady on the trigger as it points at Quynh.

But he will not pull it. Could never again. Not on his family, not when she stepped out of his head and out of his death and into the flesh. Not when she doesn’t need to step into his heart, because she flooded it eons ago.

“Booker,” she breathes, breathes out soft sound and air instead of screaming out ocean. “It’s nice to finally meet you.”

She raises a glass of water to her lips.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Unending thanks to Saellys aka Hauntedfalcon on Tumblr for the beta and cheerleading.
> 
> More warnings: Booker is blatantly alcoholic and suicidal, and actively abusing both. Lots of drowning. Lots of dying and reviving.


	2. Queen, White-Quynh

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There was a time, innumerable deaths ago, when horror was followed by hope. She had known that prisons would crumble around her, that she would outlast any cage. Freedom had always been her fate, and it would find her again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cannot emphasize enough how canon-typical all the violence is. See end notes for more detailed warnings if you need 'em.

These are the stages of dying:

Revival. The visions go dark, and she gradually becomes aware of her body. This is the best time, when she doesn’t have to know anything.

Panic. She takes a breath in because it has to happen, has always been the last step back to life. She takes a breath that floods her. And it’s _water,_ always water, but it burns all the same: the sharp shock of liquid she never swallowed, the pressure as it forges the wrong path through her, the sting of salt in the wound. It hurts every time.

Her eyes shoot open because she cannot help it, but they slam shut again as she coughs. Then they wrench open. Her mouth screams. Her heart sprints. Her limbs thrash. This is the worst time, when she must live through the monotonous dread again, and she has the same answer to her question.

Fury. Her throat closes up inside her, which makes her feel more trapped than anything on earth or in its depths ever has, more trapped than any confinement to place and all restriction of movement. But the overwhelming anxiety of _breathing the wrong element_ ends. She finally regains control over herself.

The rage is because control is useless. She cannot use it.

She has kicked and punched and kneed and elbowed and slammed herself at every inch of her cage. She has scratched her nails to bleeding stubs, has broken teeth and nose and cheekbones many times over, has accidentally blinded an eye in trying to widen the tantalizing view of freedom above her.

It has all been useless. She has never made a single impression in any part of the metal. It is insane to keep trying, and she does keep trying, and she is so angry.

Blackout. The water seems to drag more heavily against her limbs. The confines of her coffin become vast, its walls impossible to reach. Grey mosaics tile across her eyes until they roll back in their sockets and all light is gone. She wonders, hopes: “Is this it? Will this time be the one?” Then all is gone.

Visions. The images are as clear as her dreams of Andromache and Lykon had been, with none of the discoloration and distortion and crowding and confusion of the twin, twining glimpses of Yusuf and Nicolo.

Quynh is not herself, not a being, she is not even a thing manifest while these visions appear. She is only the experience, the act of seeing. 

Then the visions go dark, and she gradually becomes aware of her body as the cycle restarts. She begins to die.

...

Those have not always been the stages of dying.

There was a time, innumerable deaths ago, when horror was followed by hope. She had known that prisons would crumble around her, that she would outlast any cage. Freedom had always been her fate, and it would find her again. 

The sea would rust the iron quickly, deplete it away to nothing. One of her blows would cleave straight through the metal and she’d follow at once, would break out of the prison at last. She would pick any direction plus up, out, away forever. She would walk and jump and swim and float, she would die as many times as it took, and soon enough she would be above the water, maybe even on land, and breathing air, air, air, air, air. And then she would find her family.

The only thing that could stop her was if they found her first. Dredged the prison up from the depths and freed her themselves, pried open the casket and pressed her to them once more. The only salt water to trouble any of them again would be tears of gratitude at their reunion, and she would breathe air, air, air.

Later when she had recovered, Quynh would melt down the cage that was never hers, forge its remains into swords that _are._ She would distribute her weapons among themselves, and they would turn as one upon the cowards who burn alive and bury at sea and steal the breath of anyone whose differences they refused to abide.

There was a time, innumerable deaths ago, when her question was asked not as she lost herself at the end of the cycle, but as she found herself at its beginning. When “the one” was still “when I go free.”

...

There was another time, innumerable deaths later, when the panic was followed by nothing. She conceded that the cage was hers, a worthy match, as unreasonably persistent as she was herself.

No more could she muster the will to fight a fruitless war. She just let her limbs lie where they landed. No longer did she dream that her family might rescue her. She just stared up at the world beyond her prison and waited for her eyes to close.

That was when the question changed.

...

Later still, the nothingness abruptly gave way to winter. The cold of heat leached from skin as blood abandoned nonvital areas, then numbness, then loss of all sensation below the knot.

Because those were the stages of slow surrender at the end of a rope.

She had suffocated countless times and yet this was shocking, was fathoms away from the drowning she knew so well. Yet it was still familiar. She remembered suspension in the air while gasping desperately for it. She remembered the unrelenting weight of her body digging the noose tighter into her throat. She remembered how long it took this man to die.

Because it was a man. She saw him, the red lines through the whites of his eyes and spittle spreading over his purpling lips. His face was ashen and agonized and terribly afraid.

She knew this because she could see it, but she felt it, too: the drawing tight of his brows, the bulging of his eyes, the dreadful thickening of his tongue. She suffered his intrinsic terror as he neared his first death, and then his rising horror when he revived only to repeat it all again.

And then the vision went dark, and she gradually became aware of her body. But she remembered the visceral sensations of this novel way to die, and when the panic passed, she moved her arms by her own volition for the first time in she could not know how long.

The next time, she died with her hands hugging her neck.

...

The visions did not change anything. It does not revitalize her be privy to a different death, to catch glimpses of a world that bestows other tortures.

If it were boredom that plagued her, they might have. But she could already see outside her box. She could have waited with avid anticipation for a fish to cross her line of sight, could have kept an obsessive track of the differing amounts of light that filtered down to her.

Instead she aches for the end of her own misery. Sharing someone else’s does not lighten her load.

It does even less after his stopped.

This is the difference between visions of his life and visions of his death: when he is alive, she is mere phantom, is sight without eyes to do the seeing. In his life he is larger than life, close by, lit by some sourceless light, all that she sees.

In death, she is still that phantom seeing him, but at the same time she is him. She dies his death, she feels his every physical pain, catches his feelings like they’re contagious, sees fleeting hints of his surroundings and a baffling assortment of things he has recently seen.

Back then, the flood of sensation she sunk into with each of his deaths dried up without warning. She had no idea what happened that he went free, that he stopped dying so regularly. She knew only that it would not happen for her. 

This is the inalterable fact of her existence: Nothing changes.

…

There is no way for her to mark the passage of time, either hers or the man’s. It does not ultimately matter whether she has moments or years between death and life, because her experience is the same regardless. Unless he dies, her view of him is the same all-encompassing one that gives her no clue as to his time of day.

So she does not know how long it is between her first vision of the man and his first death with Andromache. And she has no idea how long he might have lived between their first meeting and now.

All she knows is that when she sees her for the first time since being locked into her coffin, Andromache has doffed the necklace.

If she hadn’t given up long ago, the indisputable evidence that Andromache has forgotten her would have done it.

…

Nothing changed when the man drifted into her existence, and nothing changed when she learned he had met Andromache, and nothing changed when she learned he later met Yusuf and Nicolo.

But then the man died again, and this time Quynh saw that her necklace dangled once more from Andromache’s throat.

And still no things changed, but Quynh had to. She returned to fighting. Because the helpless confusion, the wondering _why,_ drove her completely mad.

…

These are the stages of dying: revival, panic, fury, blackout, visions.

Whenever she knows herself, from the panic through the fury to when she finally blacks out, she feels crazy.

She feels crazier when her cage moves.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks again to Saellys Hauntedfalcon for betaing and poking me with a stick when I needed it! Apologies for changing things AGAIN after she got through with it-any mistakes are mine, and I deserve so many pokes.
> 
> Lots of description of drowning and hanging to death, as well as mentions of self-injury including hand, face, and eye trauma. Lots of dying and reviving.


	3. Queen, Black-Nile

The first thing they do after leaving Copley’s is get the hell out of dodgy England, with its security checkpoints and CCTV and complete lack of safehouses.

Relatedly, Nile has a new definition of “dodgy.”

The others don’t relax until they’re back in France, where apparently they have their choice of safehouses so long as that choice is “shitty”. Booker’s go bag is short on matches now so they send Nicky into a drugstore for more, since apparently there isn’t any electricity where they’re headed and they’ll need to do things like see and keep Andy from dying of hypothermia during the night.

Joe gets wistful when Nile gripes goodnaturedly about how at least the mine had a generator. “We used Goussainville as our homebase for western Europe. It always happens when one is too much nicer than the others. We let them lapse.”

“We can get another TV,” Andy scoffs, worrying at her necklace as she watches the store for Nicky’s reappearance. She has a pistol taped to the car’s roof above her. There’s another one down the back of her jeans, even though she’s no longer immune to aches. “Until then you’ll have to make do watching the football on a phone.”

Joe looks her over and frowns before directing his gaze back to the shop as well.

…

They’ll stay in France only long enough to have one of their contacts mock up yet another new set of papers for Nile, this time with her hailing from Cameroon.

“But I don’t know anything about Cameroon.” She can’t even Wikipedia it until they set her up with a burner phone, and apparently that’s low on the list of priorities.

“It is a Christian majority, and French is an official language there,” Nicky assures her. “It will be fine so long as you avoid your American accent with anyone checking your visa.”

“My accent’s American in French, too.” Not to mention that she’s barely used it since high school.

He does his tiny smile that’s almost entirely in the eyebrows. “Ah, but no one knows what that sounds like. Americans speak only English.”

“Glass houses,” Joe says from across the room, and Nicky’s eyebrows smile a little more. Nile doesn’t know what he says in response, but at least she recognizes Arabic.

Then Andy winces as she turns over in her sleep. Conversation dies, just as it does every time she reveals pain. The lift to Nicky’s brow is gone, and Joe looks as heartbroken as he had staring through the bar window at Booker. Nile hunches over, lets her clasped hands hang between her knees. Breathes.

…

The Alpha safehouse in Turkey is another homebase, and Nile’s glad to have a mattress again. She doesn’t have the talent the others do for conking out whenever, wherever, on whatever.

She’s not especially glad that they apparently sleep in the same room even when there are others available.

“This is literally an entire house,” she says when she sees the twin beds, practically cots, lined up like she was back in the barracks. “Why are you crammed into one room?” 

Andy pushes in past her and sinks carefully onto the one in the middle. Nile follows and sets the bag she’s been lugging around for Andy on the floor at the foot of that bed. Andy waves thanks with a slight twitch of fingers without looking up.

Nicky drops his bag on the bed wedged in the corner. “So we can all cuddle,” he says, and pushes Joe’s bag under the same one. “Come, we will discover what horrors have grown in the refrigerator since we left.”

In the kitchen, Joe has already started waging biochemical warfare on the trash can. “We should just toss the whole fridge,” he says, crouching to stare into the crisper. Then he looks over his shoulder at them. “Where’s Andy?”

“She’s lying down,” Nile says, and the energy drains out of Joe. He locks eyes with Nicky over Nile’s shoulder.

“It is good for her to rest,” Nicky says, and briefly clasps above her elbow before he goes over to inspect the trash. Joe puts up a hand and Nicky pulls him to standing.

This is a thing they do, she’s noticed. The cuddling thing was a joke-the others are not clingy. They spread out in a room. But the three of them reach for each other sometimes, and she’s been included in that since London. She can still conjure up Andy’s hand on the back of her neck.

…

“I think I should move to a different room,” she says over yet another shelf stable breakfast of protein bars. They’ve eaten nothing else in any of the safehouses since Goussainville. Now that they’re going to be in one place for a while, Nicky has sworn up and down that they will go buy real food in time to cook lunch.

“Tired of us already?” Joe says, expression carefully blank. It’s more unsettling than anger would have been. Across the table from him Nicky’s is blank too, but that’s to be expected.

“I wake the rest of you up. You don’t need that.”

“We need it desperately. Joe sleeps like a stone.”

“Ha.” She looks away, swallows down nothing but unease. These might be hundreds of years of tradition that she’s balking at, tactics that have literally survived the test of time. “I was a Marine. I know what it’s like to be woken up at all hours for no reason, just because one of the other girls was too loud. And we tried to keep that crap to a minimum. No one wants to be that guy.” 

She looks up at them from her generic brand peanut butter bar. Nicky placidly sips his tea, which tells her nothing, and Joe’s face is still a mask. It’s wild how quickly she’s come to rely on his expressiveness to gauge everyone else. 

“And this is multiple times a night, every night. It might be okay for us, I don’t even know how this healing thing works. But Andy needs the sleep. That’s why she’s doing it all the time.” It’s inarguably true. She hadn’t gotten up with them this morning. “They had me down for bed-bound recovery for a couple _weeks_ after I got cut, and then light duty and physical therapy for ages after that. She has to be able to rest!”

“She sleeps better with family in view. All of us do," says Nicky.

“But not with me!”

Joe finally snaps. “Especially with you!” he cries, looking wretched “You didn’t see how she died when we learned what Booker had done. You came for us and she came alive. Every time she looks at you it's like she can breathe again.”

“And how long do you think that’ll last with me reminding her of Quynh every time I close my eyes?”

Joe breaks completely, has to cover his mouth and stare at her, wrecked. Nicky pushes his cup away before putting his elbows on the table and leaning toward her.

“Quynh was with us for half our lives. She was our sister. What doesn’t remind us of her absence? We cannot pass a day without thinking of her. How much more so for Andy, who knew her longer and loved her better? You have not given us this burden. We already carried it.”

Nile stares up at the ceiling, willing tears away. How is she supposed to carve her own space here, when they have so much history she was never a part of? The hole where Booker should be already fills every space, every moment between them. She can’t even see the edges of how vast Quynh’s void must be.

God, she wants her family. Her life. The places she fit.

“You shouldn’t have to see what it’s like for her. Drowning over and over, and fighting it. It’s almost too much for me, that means it’s worse for you.”

Joe has pulled himself together. He smiles weakly. “We’re almost a thousand years old. We can take it.”

The corners of Nicky’s mouth lift a little, but without it reaching to his eyebrows the smile seems as sad as Joe’s. “We do not want you to hide your pain, Nile.”

The desperate question bursts forth against her will: “How am I supposed to fit here?”

They glance at each other, and when he turns back to her Joe’s smile has mustered most of its strength again. “We make space for you. For all that you are. We’ve waited to love you for hundreds of years, and now we finally get to know you. So we want to know you wholly. We wouldn’t pass up any part of you. We never want you to hide yourself.”

“Ugh,” says Andy directly behind Nile, and she jumps. She catches Nicky smiling with both eyebrows before she turns.

Andy is leaning against the doorway, favoring her left side. She looks exhausted, pained. “Could you all care less loudly? I hear some of us need to sleep.” 

Nile feels stricken for a moment until Joe chuckles, which breaks Andy’s poker face. Thank God for Joe: her emotional barometer.

Andy comes and takes Nile by the back of the neck, getting so close that Nile can’t avoid her steady, sure eyes. “Don’t try to martyr yourself. You can’t die, remember?”

Nile sighs and all her tension blows out with the air. It’s enough for now. She leans forward so their foreheads touch.

…

She gets roped into carrying Nicky’s bags for the market run with the promise of hooking her up with a lifeline of a satellite connection. Joe doesn’t get to come because he and Nicky refuse to leave Andy on her own. Andy doesn’t get to come because Nile shot her down when she suggested that she was perfectly fit for haggling and hauling.

This becomes something of a theme.

Andy wants to get to work. Andy needs to sit there until her intestines grow back together. Nile snatches the phone from her hand and barks at Copley that she, Nile, will contact him when they are ready to start considering jobs again. She crushes it under the steel toe of her combat boot without waiting for his response.

Andy wants to train her. She has strong opinions that Joe is letting Nile flinch away from injury too much. Again, Andy needs to relax until her stitches aren’t in danger of ripping. Nile snaps that if Andy hadn’t spent hundreds of years ignoring her own pain responses, maybe she wouldn’t have reopened all her internal bleeds by rolling around wrestling armored mercs with an axe when she should have been waiting with her team.

Andy wants to take back her shift in the watch rotation. She complains that she gets plenty of sleep during the day, she can contribute a couple hours at night. Again, Andy needs to sit her ass down until she heals up properly. Nile schools her on decades of sleep hygiene research, light’s effects on circadian rhythms, and how both REM and deep sleep are necessary to the cellular processes of physical recovery.

Joe and Nicky watch these arguments like tennis matches. They are inevitably floored whenever Nile wins one.

But their delight is as nothing compared to the thrilled calculation in Andy’s eyes. She watches Nile debate her, too.

...

That doesn’t mean she wins many. For instance, her arguments about how she’s interrupting Andy’s sleep cycles still haven’t gotten Nile her own room.

Nicky said it but Andy is the one to enforce it: they really don’t want her to hide her pain. So she doesn’t.

She lets them see her longing for her family, her uncertainty in the face of their entrenched traditions, her worry over Andy. They understand the fractal horrors of suddenly facing eternity, the hopeless frustration of questions that will never have answers.

She reaches out to them too, nowadays.

And all of them shoulder the spiraling pain of Quynh’s nightmare together: they, the grief and regret; she, the grief and living through trauma and hurting them. They, the inability to protect her; she, the inability to protect them. Nile watches Andy play with her necklace, watches Joe’s face screw up, watches the tired slope of Nicky’s shoulders. She meets their sympathetic gazes with her own. She can bear it, and so can they.

Until the night she wakes up gasping, and the sheets are still clammy because she just relived mowing down Merrick guards outside the elevator, but Quynh was _just gone._

She tells them her dream, tells them Quynh’s disappearance from it, and Andy turns bone-white. 

Her hands fly to her necklace. “Are you fucking with me?” Then she slams her fists against the mattress before Nile can even say anything. They all know Nile would never, _could_ never, not about this. Andy storms out to pace the house, already pulling her pendant along its cord again.

Nile shoots Nicky a questioning look, wondering whether they should follow. He hesitates long enough that Joe answers by slinking into the bedroom, having abdicated his watch. They all settle back into bed. They’ll give Andy the time she needs.

In the morning Andy’s necklace is also _just gone,_ and she refuses to lose any more fights.

Nile calls Copley.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All the usual gratitude, blood debts, firstborns, etc, to Saellys/Hauntedfalcon for the beta, but also a special shoutout to that chess metaphor post that provided the necessary spite to power through. I do not know who made it, but I promise them that Nile is not a pawn.
> 
> Warning for mentions of drowning but no graphic depictions of violence this chapter! What a lovely respite. It won't last.


End file.
